How to Use Disk Utility to Erase a Macintosh Hard Drive

This article comes from the following address - http://www.udel.edu/pnpi/tools/erase/mac/erasedisk.html

You must reboot your computer using the OS X system CD that came with your Macintosh. To do so, follow these steps:

• Insert the CD into the CD drive.
• Hold down the C key during the startup process.

1. Select your preferred language. You will then see the Welcome to the Mac OS X Installer window.
2. From the Installer Menu Bar, click Open Disk Utility. You will then see the Disk Utility window.
3. In the left pane of the Disk Utility window, click the drive you want to erase.
4. In the right pane of the Disk Utility window, click the Erase tab.
5. From the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
6. In the Name field, highlight the existing text and type the name the hard drive is to be called after it's formatted.
7. NOTE: If you ever plan to connect another computer running OS 9 to this hard drive, you'll want to install the Mac OS 9 disk driver, so that this disk will be visible from an OS 9-booted computer. If you don't know if you will do this in the future, it's best to install these drivers.
8. The following are the available security options:

• Don't Erase Data—This option only rewrites the headers on the disk. Files can be recovered by forensics, disk utilities, and other advanced recovery software.
• Zero Out Data—There are forensics utilities that, albeit expensive and time consuming, can retrieve zeroed-out data.
• 7-Pass Erase—This is considered sufficient by government standards to erase data from a disk. It writes random data over the disk seven times. It may take several hours or more to complete this process.
• 35-Pass Erase—This makes it absolutely impossible to regain any data off the drive. This option takes an extremely long time, possibly more than one day.

1. Click the radio button in front of 7-Pass Erase (recommended by UD).
2. Click OK.
3. Click Erase.
4. Confirm you want to erase. The program will unmount the volume, partition the drive, and rename the volume to the name you typed in step #7 above.